This invention relates to an enlarged pattern generator for enlarging original dot matrix patterns of characters and symbols.
Together with the recent development in document processing technologies, characters of not only one size but of many sizes are frequently required now. It is extremely uneconomical, however, to store all these required character patterns individually because this will have the consequence of requiring an unnecessarily large storage space. In order to eliminate this problem, there has been developed a method according to which only a certain standard dot pattern is retained as the original and patterns of desired sizes are obtained by making enlargements of this standard pattern. By this method, however, characters which were simply enlarged proportionally from the original usually do not look natural because the intervals between lines or dots which form the pattern are also magnified. This is illustrated by FIGS. 6(a) and 6(b) which show an original pattern and an enlarged pattern, respectively.
In order to overcome this problem, use has been made of a method of adding extra dots (in the case of a pattern formed by dots) so as to fill such intervals. By this method, however, enlarged characters still frequently fail to look natural because some of the dots are added into areas where corrections are not needed.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide an enlarged pattern generator which, when generating an enlarged pattern from a standard dot matrix pattern, makes pattern corrections not by adding dots but by deleting them.